Supporting open data and transparency

The transparency agenda is a pan-government initiative, in which healthcare data figures prominently.

What are the benefits of open data?

Open data, put simply, is data that can be accessed, used and shared, by anyone, for any purpose. Many organisations collect a broad range of data in order to perform their tasks: making this data publicly accessible contributes to the overall transparency agenda, which is key to:

improved outcomes and productivity in our public services

promoting higher quality and more efficient services, choice and accountability

driving economic growth by enabling the development of tools to support users, commissioners and providers of public services

Good open data should be easy to find, free to access and made available in a format that promotes its use. It should also be timely, accurate and well described. Organisations like the Open Data Institute and the Open Knowledge Foundation provide more information on open data, including ways to help assess quality and reliability.

What is the Health and Social Care Information Centre doing?

We recognise the huge opportunities that open data brings in:

increasing patient choice

improving patient outcomes

delivering increased productivity

contributing to the economic growth agenda

All of our publicly accessible data is made available under the Open Government Licence, which encourages the use and re-use of public sector data. We are leading the way in health and social care open data and, wherever possible, releasing the data underpinning all of our statistical publications to encourage others to make use of the breadth and depth of data available. We are also ensuring that our published statistical data is made available in open formats, typically machine-readable comma separated variable (csv) files, to enable the smooth re-use of our analysis.

Access health open data

Our open data is available through a range of channels including our own website and through data.gov.uk, the UK government's portal for open data which contains nearly 25,000 data sets from all central government departments and a number of other public sector bodies and local authorities.

What data is available?

We make available a broad array of different data:

Statistical publications: we currently produce over 250 publications each year - the vast majority of these contain statistical data. In most cases, the data is provided in formatted -Excel spreadsheets, as well as machine-readable comma separated variable (csv) text files. Our publications can be found in our publication catalogue, as well as in other tools such as the Indicator Portal.

Freedom of Information (FOI) and ad-hoc requests: data produced in response to FOI requests is made available to the public and can be downloaded from the FOI Disclosure Log. We also process many other ad-hoc requests for data - all of these bespoke tabulations are available from the Supplementary Information page.

Organisation and reference data: datasets on health and social care organisations can be accessed through the HSCIC's Organisation Data Service, which maintains and provides the reference data required for the health service to operate. Public-facing data on NHS organisations is also made available through NHS Choices, who provide downloads as well as a syndication service.

Corporate data: as part of the transparency agenda, all government organisations are required to publish certain details relating to what we spend and our structure.

Transparency commitments: In July 2011, the Prime Minister published a set of commitments around transparency and open data. These commitments include the release of data, under the terms of the Open Government Licence, on: